As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. The Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn’t the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?

Osama bin Laden certainly thought so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation’s editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president’s fundamental premise.

Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a “teaching moment,” an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes.

The threat of Islam
Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

Understand the crusaders
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

What really happened?
Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? … Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
“Crusading,” Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an “an act of love”—in this case, the love of one’s neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, “You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.’”

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors … unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? … And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood … condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The re-conquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, he had the power to restore the whole world to his rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:

Again I say, consider the Almighty’s goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself. … I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.
It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and his Church. It was the Crusaders’ task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

All apologies
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews’ money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.

Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:

Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. “Not for their destruction do I pray,” it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered … Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but “they only wait for the time of their deliverance.”
Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these “collateral damage.” Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

The failure of the Crusades
By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.

Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.

The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard’s French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard’s lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.

The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further—and perhaps irrevocably—apart.

The remainder of the 13th century’s Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis’s death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

Europe’s fight for its life
One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled “Of the Decline of the Faith”:

Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
‘Twould even grieve the hardest stone …
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They’re of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they’ve been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.
Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.

Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The “Sick Man of Europe” limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction.

Thomas F. Madden, is one of the top historians on medieval history and also on the Spanish Inquisition. He is an associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including The New Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople.

Dr. Bill Warner, PhD: Jihad vs. The Crusades (Excellent Video)

[Editor’s Note: This does not necessarily entail the beliefs, thoughts, or theories of the local Act chapters or the National Act office…they are my beliefs, thoughts and/or theories. What Barack Hussein Islama is trying to do again, to make Islam look ok and Christianity to look bad. The Crusades were actually the Roman Catholic Church (the ones that created Islam initially, until it got out of hand, just like the Muslim Brotherhood created ISIS until it got out of hand) going against the Muslims that were hellbent on killing everyone that did not believe the same way they did…so to defend themselves, the crusaders decided to kill EVERYONE that was not a Catholic…which included Jews and true Christians that did not believe what the Catholic Church conned off as being from Jesus.]

[Editor’s Note: This does not necessarily entail the beliefs, thoughts, or theories of the local Act chapters or the National Act office…they are my beliefs, thoughts and/or theories. There was a picture in the article from Sharia Unveiled, but with my posting my re-bloged articles in facebook, I fear that if I had the picture showing, they would pull the post…so I left the picture out…

Finally, a positive message from ISIS…

ISIS, humiliated by the Peshmerga, threatens to behead Obama, turn the U.S. into a Muslim province, and destroy France and Belgium.

The barbarians from ISIS recently released another bloody video. This one shows several of their members standing beside an executioner-style black hooded man towering over a straight-backed Kurdish captive.

The filming takes place in the middle of a street in Mosul, Iraq. We know the words spoken in the video, thanks to the translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI.org.

In this, as in all the ISIS videos, the terrorists boast about their bloodthirsty deeds committed in the name of Allah, and promise still more bloodshed.

In this video, see below, the executioner promises that ISIS will come to America and cut off President Obama’s head, right in the White House. He also promises that ISIS will turn the United States into a Muslim province.

Then the ISIS executioner threatens France and Belgium, warning them that ISIS will bring car bombs and explosives to their streets. He also threatens to cut off the heads of the French and the Belgians.

But his greatest ire is directed at Masoud Barazani, the president of the Kurds. His voice grows louder still, and he shouts out his threat to Barazani, whom he calls a dog, saying ISIS will behead him and throw him onto the trash bin of history.

It is no surprise that ISIS feels the greatest enmity for the Kurds. The Kurdish fighting force, the Peshmerga, have been fighting the ISIS forces with superhuman dedication and focus for months.

The Kurds finally regained control over Kobane, a previously Kurdish-ruled city, driving out the barbarians from all neighborhoods in the that city. The victory occurred on Monday, Jan. 27, the day after this video was made, but the tide had begun to turn earlier.

Once ISIS was routed from Kobane, Barazani said that it was “a great honor for the Kurdish people that they stood along 1,500 kilometers in the face of the most brutal terrorist organization and defeated it. This victory is the victory of humanity over the savagery of terrorists.”

And then, as if to prove Barazani’s point, the ISIS executioner says: “We will institute the laws of Allah, may he be exalted and praised.” He then turns his focus back to the Kurdish soldier at his feet, upon whose head the executioner kept his hand, throughout the speech.

“This is the fate of one of your soldiers, and every time you launch a missile, we will send you back the head of one of your soldiers.”

At the end of the original video – this is excised from the version, below – the executioner beheads the Kurdish soldier at his feet.

The Peshmerga forces have already begun their assault on the ISIS stronghold in Mosul.

An Islamic Tribunal using Sharia law in Texas has been confirmed by Breitbart Texas. The tribunal is operating as a non-profit organization in Dallas. One of the attorneys for the tribunal said participation and acceptance of the tribunal’s decisions are “voluntary.”

Breitbart Texas spoke with one of the “judges,” Dr. Taher El-badawi. He said the tribunal operates under Sharia law as a form of “non-binding dispute resolution.” El-badawi said their organization is “a tribunal, not arbitration.” A tribunal is defined by Meriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “a court or forum of justice.” The four Islamic attorneys call themselves “judges” not “arbitrators.”

El-badawi said the tribunal follows Sharia law to resolve civil disputes in family and business matters. He said they also resolve workplace disputes.

In matters of divorce, El-badawi said that “while participation in the tribunal is voluntary, a married couple cannot be considered divorced by the Islamic community unless it is granted by the tribunal.” He compared their divorce, known as “Talaq,” as something similar to the Catholic practice of annulment in that the church does not recognize civil divorce proceedings as ending a marriage.

He also said there is a difference between how a man and a woman can request a divorce under their system. “The husband can request the divorce directly from the tribunal,” El-badawi stated. “The wife must go to an Imam who will request the divorce for her.” He called it “two paths to the same result.” The practice of Khula is the process where a wife can initiate a divorce proceeding and where the husband can agree to the divorce in exchange for a financial compensation. It appears the wife must agree to give up any claim to the “dower” that was not already paid or to return it if it has already been paid. Once the financial issues are resolved the husband can then proclaim the Talaq (divorce).

El-badawi said they follow Texas family law when it comes to child support, visitation, and custody. He said that in most cases, custody of children is awarded to the mother.

Breitbart Texas asked what happens when there is a conflict between Sharia law and Texas law. El-badawi said most of the time, the laws are in agreement. When pushed further he admitted that, “we follow Sharia law.” However, he explained, “If the parties are not satisfied with the tribunal’s decision, they do not have to accept it and they can take the matter to Texas civil courts.” He did not say what the social ramifications of rejecting the “judge’s” decision would be.

The website for the Islamic Tribunal states, “The courts of the United States of America are costly and consist of ineffective lawyers. Discontent with the legal system leads many Muslims in America to postpone justice in this world and opt for an audience on the Day of Judgment.”

It goes on to state, “It is with this issue that Muslims here in America are obligated to find a way to solve conflicts and disputes according to the principles of Islamic Law and its legal heritage of fairness and justice in a manner that is reasonable and cost effective.”

In explaining Sharia law, the website states, “Stoning adulterers, cutting of the hands, polyandry and the like (all can be traced in the relevant literature and can be explained in their Islamic legal mentality and rational context in fairness and justice), are mainly a part of Islamic Criminal Law. In fact criminal law within Islam only makes up a fraction of the Shari’ah. It is unscholarly and unfair to generalize that type of understanding, that is Criminal Law, to compromise the whole of Islamic law if we stick to speaking in technical terms.”

El-badawi restated several times that participation in the tribunal is voluntary. However, he would not discuss what happens to someone who did not follow their rulings.

– – –

Here is an ‘enlightening’ video of Chris Matthews attacking concerned Americans from Texas just one year ago…and calling sharia law in America ‘..non-existent..’ Ugh, what a blind, ignorant liberal fool.

WHY WE FIGHT ISLAM…

I was recently asked: Why fight Islam? The short answer is because Islam fights us and since it knows no borders and it knows no mercy, it will keep fighting us until we are defeated or we – hopefully – stop them forever.

The goal in Islam is world domination and a central part of every Muslim’s religious practise is to spread his faith with all possible means until it covers the Earth completely. Ever since the 6th century when Islam’s founder and self-proclaimed prophet, Mohammed (who maybe never existed), set out to conquer neighbouring towns, killing, maiming, raping and enslaving scores, Islam has spread its suppressing and destructive doctrine as far as it could. Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist countries and cultures have been crushed by relentless waves of jihadis (Arabic: mujahideens), leaving up to 270 million non-Muslims dead, mostly killed in exceedingly barbaric ways. The recent Islamic takeover of areas in Africa, the Middle East and Western cities that until recently were not under Sharia, is not a new phenomena. It is just another phase of a 1,400 year old war against non-Muslims, with the aim of consolidating Muslim power over non-Muslims, and Islamic rule over democracy and human rights. With millions of Muslims fleeing to the West from their self-created atrocities, Islam is about to spread to countries that has been almost Muslim-free. Citizens of Eastern Europe and Baltic States who think that West Europe can handle the problem without their help are naive and lack solidarity: it is time for the democratic world to stand together. Since the nature of Islam is to eventually spread everywhere, nobody is safe anyway.

What do they want?

The final goal of Islam is a worldwide Caliphate ruled by Sharia. The world that Islam’s followers dream of is a planet ordered after the wishes of Allah and his prophet. In such a world there is no Free Speech since the slightest criticism of the system is to be punished by death. There is not even Freedom of Thought, since everybody has to believe in Allah and Mohammed as his prophet, pray five times a day, eat halal, and kill family members and others flinching from the Islamic rules. According to Sharia, women are effectively the property of their male family members and men are allowed to have four wives and beat them all. Jews and Christians will be spared death if they pay a protection tax, jizya, and accept the status as dhimmis, second class citizens whom Muslims are allowed to abuse and rape on a whim. People not believing in the Old Testament – Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and others – will have the choice between being killed or converting to Islam (which constitutes psychological rape and forces one to live a strict Muslim life, including killing other non-Muslims).

A society where science and research must be aligned with the world view of a crazed pedophile living in the 6th century (Mohammed married and started fondeling Aisha when she was six and had intercourse with her when she was nine) will of course not be able to establish a functioning stable economy, political system or the comforts of modern medicine, technology and infrastructure.

When it comes to human freedom and rights, the Soviet Union was a utopia compared to any Islamic caliphate, which can best be compared to the joy- and loveless, totalitarian worlds of anger depicted by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of The Rings and in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Should our civilization collapse under Islamic aggression – aided by our own political correctness, cowardice, laziness – the only known place with intelligent life in this universe will be a dark and destroyed planet drifting through space, populated by billions of mostly inbred humans living in total misery, enslaved by the freedom-hating, death-loving, brutal, mind-numbing Sharia. What tragedy could be worse than that?

Can it happen to us?

Well, the millions of non-Muslims who used to live where Islam now rules probably asked themselves that same question… And yes, it will also happen to us, if we do not stop Islam. Western intelligence services increasingly warn that thousands of Muslims outside and inside our own countries are preparing themselves to fulfill their religious duty.

Meanwhile we settle with hoping that Muslims will be as pacified by our nursing welfare states and reassuring media as we have become ourselves.

Islam knows no borders and no mercy, and if our generation does not stop them, the next generation will not even have a chance to make the attempt. Our grandfathers defeated Nazism, our parents’ generation overcame Communism. The great challenge of our time is Islam – an enemy of freedom more present, fanatic and vast in numbers than any totalitarian system before it. This enemy is different than anything we have encountered before: You can not intimidate an enemy who loves death more than life.

Our police is already unable to uphold the law in many of the Muslim ghettos mushrooming everywhere, even in smaller towns. Ever more regular outbreaks of what can best be described as minor incidents of civil war give us a taste of what is waiting for us later this decade (according to Al Qaeda’s prophetic plan made in the 1990s, this will happen in 2016 – Arab governments should be toppled from around 2010 and an Islamic state was planned to be established from 2013…).

Muslim dominated areas are increasing in numbers and boldness – encouraged by the lack of consequence from Western authorities – and it is only a matter of time before they evolve into permanently warring Muslim enclaves fighting for unconstitutional, religious rights. Through our self-inflicted invasion we are creating our own Gaza Strips, which are already spawning an unending stream of attacks against non-Muslims and the surrounding non-Islamic society. Muslim immigration is crushing our economy, undermining our hard-won safety, attacking free speech and increasingly changing physical areas of our cities into unrecognizable, dangerous no-go sharia-zones.

Muslims believing in jihad are neither extremists, nor a minority. Muslims believing in the obligation to wage jihad to fulfill their religious duty are following mainstream fundamentals of Islam as it is clearly written unambiguously and repeatedly in the Quran and Mohammed’s equally holy life story, the Hadiths. 75 percent of the roughly 56 million Muslims living in Europe believe that the Quran must be taken literally and 65 percent think that the Sharia is more important than democratic laws. 80 percent of young Turks in Holland believe that Jihad against non-Muslims is fine. 27 percent of all French youth and 14 percent of all British youths – presumably including the vast majority of young Muslims in these countries – support the Islamic State. What do these numbers mean? They mean that the countless Muslim ghettos eating up Western towns and cities are populated with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people supporting the jihadi doctrine. What will happen when they feel strong enough to destroy and overtake our societies? Will they remain passive and peaceful, or will they seize the chance? Many, surely, will do the latter.

Instead of being thankful for the safety and welfare provided by hard working Western tax payers, Muslims in Europe have raised an army of jihadis supporting Islam’s genocidal agenda.

What can we do?

Or rather: What must we do, in order to prevail for the sake of humanity and future generations?

Through democratic means, we must mobilize the immense power and organisational talent that lies behind the creation of the most free, rich, and technologically advanced societies in world history and direct it towards our own survival. If we manage to awaken this sleeping giant before our countries are destroyed by barbarians – just like all other high cultures before ours – we will be able to defeat the hordes of inbred fanatics without panic or hate. During this crucial historical period we must not lose our human face and destroy the very values we are trying to protect. We must stay honest, outspoken and engage with realistic means and force, while staying focused on long term win-win solutions. By approaching the problem without fear, but only with mental surplus and a broad overview, we can succeed while creating only a minimum amount of unavoidable harm. Reacting with totalitarian measures such as banning Free Speech to protect “social cohesion” or succumbing to immature emotions for revenge alone will not benefit our cause.

Peaceful societies with social values and a high degree of morality have been exploited to a devastating degree – economically, culturally and demographically – by myriads of Muslim immigrants and refugees.

Modern welfare and decades of peace have put our survival instinct into hibernation. This makes it difficult for us to understand that we will not overcome this historical challenge without the use of real force. A gentle approach that might be affordable under healthy demographic conditions is suicidal when confronted with a weapon of mass-destruction like Islam. We have come to this point because for too long, we have taken freedom for granted.

Muslims will experience our outspoken honesty and rational self-defensive measures as an attack against their religious rights and as a call for God-given obligation to defend their religion with all possible means. When Muslims decide that their religion is under attack, all sorts of violent Quranic paragraphs are activated. Securing ourselves and our descendants from this cancer already gnawing at every vital part of our societies requires immensely persistent political and public determination. Fighting back will provoke our self-proclaimed enemy and strengthen their world famous, childish, anger and victim mentality. But there is no reason to shy away from confrontation, as there is no way around a real clash anyway – and the sooner it comes, the fewer in numbers and less organised they will be. Risking a few Facebook friends or a promotion at work by joining a demonstration or even speaking out publicly is a small price compared to how grave the danger is and what will be lost forever if we remain passive in these crucial years.

The danger of Islam is very real, it will not go away by itself. Just look at history.

It is our duty to fulfill the responsibility that our forefathers courageously fulfilled, often with great costs: to protect and pass on our hard won values and freedom to future generations, allowing them to pursuit happiness and a chance to develop and live their fullest human potential.

Standing up against Islam’s soldiers and against political correctness activates and increases the most noble human qualities: honesty, bravery, gut feeling, cooperation, hard work, intelligence, and compassion. It is no surprise that one meets the best people in the counter-Islam movement.

It is clear that we can not trust our media and present politicians to give the facts about Islam and the consequences of Muslim mass-immigration. So it is up to us – the People – to speak the obvious truths, tell our stories, spread important news, facts and statistics and inspire our co-voters to elect responsible leaders. Using Facebook, Twitter and other modern means of mass-communication in good style (a handful of Islam-related posts per week is enough) is easy and a must-do. The same goes for sending articles and complaints to journalists and politicians. Writing letters to the newspapers sharpens the mind and arguments of ourselves and others, and even if the letters are not printed, they make the editors aware of what their readers find interesting – and what their newspapers therefore have to report in order to sell. We should protest loudly and publicly if our children’s schools lie to our offspring about Islam or consciously start serving halal. That same reaction should happen if our local planning committee considers allowing mosques or “Islamic cultural centers” – which effectively function as propaganda hubs for the Quran’s genocidal message that control and radicalize local Muslims. Encouraging and supporting political parties, organisations and individuals standing up for Free Speech, democracy and human rights by taking the risks included in openly opposing Islam, Muslim immigration and political correctness is natural. If you would like to further develop your protective abilities, get strong, learn martial arts, and consider joining the National Guard. If you are involved in political activities, keep bureaucracy to a minimum, become real friends and do not compete with your fellow counter-jihad colleagues. We should be glad that people work differently: the problem is many sided and the world needs many different voices in order to understand and realize what must be done.

Start by informing yourself by reading blogs like EuropeNews.dk, JihadWatch.org, 10News.dk, VladTepesBlog.com, TheReligionofPeace.com. There are also a considerable amount of Facebook groups and Twitters worth following – also in your own language. Use these as a basis for spreading and translating important facts to your countrymen and women, including media and law makers. Join demonstrations (and bring your friends), wear t-shirts with freedom-related slogans and learn a few important statistics and Quran quotes.

Fighting ignorance, promoting courage

Using democratic tools like these is nothing else than peacefully removing ignorance which is the cause of suffering in so many areas of life – ignorance that in this case can lead our societies into total destruction and our future generations into slavery.

Inspire others with your own brave example and avoid anger: we can hate the system, but we can not hate the people. As beings mainly behave the way they feel, we can only wish them good feelings and a minimum of necessary, pedagogical harm. Remember that Muslims are the first victims of Islam, as their system is full of rules and brutal punishments aimed at themselves. Muslims are the real islamophobes: only fear can explain peoples’ submission to such a joyless, unfree and painful system, forcing them to think and behave in ways that creates ever more suffering in their own lives.

Until Muslims free themselves from the chains of sharia, we must make sure that the trouble that their religion brainwashes and forces them to make, happens from a sufficiently safe distance. Therefore we must stop non-Western (Muslim) immigration, and make it as difficult as possible for followers of the religion of submission to live here by banning any kind of Islamization. If they want mosques, halal, prayer rooms, cousin-marriages, and Islamic holidays, they must settle elsewhere. We do not want any mosques or minarets, no public or foreign funding of Islamic organisations or imams. All Muslims coming to our lands must actively and publicly reject the violent and criminal passages of the Islamic scriptures. Performing or promoting jihad is treason and should result in loss of citizenship. This means that we would probably have to find ways to accommodate large amounts of people (see above statistical examples from Holland, France and England) in or near Islamic countries where they do not suffer from living outside their cultural circle. The only win-win solution is that we use the money we save by deporting jihadis (each one who usually costs hundreds of thousands of euros in expences for welfare and law enforcement) to pay third world countries for having fewer children (thus limiting over-population, another cause of enormous suffering and millions of refugees) and for accommodating the world’s Muslim refugees and our deported supporters of jihad.

In this way can we save humanity from what is probably the greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind: a monstrous weapon of mass destruction that has already killed millions of people and destroyed countless cultures and societies before ours. A system that is robbing its own followers of the most basic human rights and which is forcing them to suppress and kill their own. A system that is aiming at subjugating all human beings – Muslims and non-Muslims – under barbaric, totalitarian laws. A system that calls itself a religion but is so much more than that. A system that praises death more than life. A system that knows no mercy and no borders.

In this ground-breaking film, historian Tom Holland explores how a new religion – Islam – emerged from the seedbed of the ancient world, and asks what we really know for certain about its rise. The result is an extraordinary detective story. Traditionally, Muslims and non-Muslims alike have believed that Islam was born in the full light of history. But a large number of historians now doubt that presumption, and question much of what Muslim tradition has to tell us about the birth of Islam.

CCTV footage of Muslim attacker.

The suspect in the Oct. 23 hatchet attack on two New York City cops had been searching online for jihadist propaganda and foreign terror organizations — as well as information on martyrdom and suicide bombings — in the weeks leading up to the assault, according to a city counterterrorism bureau intelligence assessment obtained by Fox News.

While initial reporting from unnamed sources suggested Zale Thompson may have been motivated by anti-government or black power sentiments, the four-page document provides new details that speak to Thompson’s self-radicalization. They show his online obsession with the “message” of terror groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The intelligence assessment, further, said he “may have held a long-standing interest in violent jihad.”

The investigation is ongoing, and the report says “there is no evidence that Thompson conspired with other individuals to carry out the attack” — but it adds that his Internet searches were focused on known terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, its affiliate in Somalia known as al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State. It also documents 58 search terms from Thompson’s electronic records that range from “jihad against the infidels” to “fatwa against americans” to “death to America in Arabic.”

The search history with terms such as “is Saudi Arabia a member of the United Nations” and “Saudi Arabic 69th general assembly un” also suggests Thompson may have considered targeting the annual U.N. conference and Saudi dignitaries.

The intelligence assessment includes an evidence photo from the crime scene where Thompson appeared to stalk the rookie cops, attacking them with the hatchet — before he was shot dead. A second ax and hunting knife from the suspect’s home were also pictured.

Officer Kenneth Healey, 25, suffered a severe head injury in the attack, and Officer Joseph Meeker, 24, was injured in the arm. Both are rookie officers.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., current member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, noted that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said the attack was terrorism soon after it happened. King said the assessment was pulled together and shared with police across the country after a similar ax attack in Washington, D.C. He said the document shows “it was not just one deranged person, but he was obsessed with Islamic terrorism.”

“This was jihadist inspired. Plain and simple,” said Frank Cilluffo, associate vice president and director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute of George Washington University. “He had so many search terms in this respect, I think it would be very difficult to suggest that it’s anything but.”

The intelligence assessment says there is no known link between the New York attack and the one in Washington on Oct. 31 — where the suspect swung an ax into the window of a police cruiser — but suggests the pattern of attacks on military and law enforcement, including recently against Canadian soldiers, cannot be ignored.

“As I understand it, NYPD is already instituting new actions, and new steps where instead of patrolling alone, they are going to have group patrols, and stay together even, even simple measures such as having lunch. They are hoping that people will stick together, so you can have two eyes and ears on potential threat,” Cilluffo said.

King said ISIS is recruiting individuals on the margins of society. “It shows the real necessity of having surveillance in neighborhoods,” he said. “It may not have prevented this attack. But the best way for the police to find out in advance about these potential threats is through informants and people in the community.”

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